Urban form

As Western industrial cities rapidly expanded during the first part of the 20th century, factories encroached upon residential areas, tenements crowded in among small houses, and skyscrapers overshadowed other buildings. To preserve property values and achieve economy and efficiency in the structure and arrangement of the city, policy makers perceived a need to sort out incompatible activities, set some limits upon building size, and protect established areas from despoilment. Master plans prescribed the desired patterns of traffic circulation, bulk and density levels, and necessary public improvements. Zoning regulations, first instituted in the early decades of the 20th century, were the principal means for achieving these goals. They set maximums for building breadth and height and designated acceptable configurations of structures within demarcated areas (zones); most important in terms of their effect on urban development, zoning codes segregated particular uses of urban space. Thus, housing, manufacturing, and retail activities, which formerly intermixed, now took place in different parts of the city. Although zoning protected residents from adjacent noxious uses, it had the less-desirable further effect of forcing long trips to work and increasing routine travel, thereby contributing to traffic congestion and limiting activity in each part of the city to different times of the day. Some zoning codes provoked disputes. Court cases in the United States challenged zoning ordinances that, by requiring large single-residence dwellings on large lots, restricted the construction of affordable homes for low-income households. In some states courts struck down exclusionary zoning, and some remedial legislation was passed.

Parallel to the evolution of zoning in the United States was the development of subdivision controls, which subjected the initial laying out of vacant land to public regulation. These regulations affected the design of new developments and specified that new streets had to conform to the overall city plan. Some subdivision ordinances required property developers to provide the land needed for streets, playgrounds, and school sites and to pay all or most of the cost of building these facilities.

After World War II a number of European countries, especially France, the Netherlands, Germany, and the Soviet Union, undertook the building of new towns (comprehensive new developments outside city centres) as governmental enterprises. Concerned with what they regarded as too much density within urban areas, governments constructed these new towns as a means of capturing the overspill from cities within planned developments rather than allowing haphazard exurban growth. Most of them, except in the Soviet Union, were primarily residential suburbs, although some British towns such as Milton Keynes did succeed in attracting both industry and population within low-rise conurbations. In Sweden the government successfully constructed accessible high-rise residential suburbs with mixed-income occupancy. Tapiola, in metropolitan Helsinki, Finland, was a low-rise ensemble embodying many of Howard’s original ideas and incorporating architecture of the highest order. New town development in France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium, however, mostly resulted in large, uninviting high-rise residential projects for the working class on the urban periphery.

American postwar new town development depended largely on private initiative, with Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; Irvine, California; and Seaside, Florida, serving as some of the better-known examples. Preceding these efforts, however, were a number of small, privately planned suburbs, including Riverside, Illinois, a planned community outside Chicago that was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1868–69, and Radburn, New Jersey, built in 1929 according to plans conceived by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright. There are a few outstanding examples of planned new cities in such widely scattered places as India (where Le Corbusier designed Chandigarh), the Middle East, and South America.

In Asia the emerging industrial economies of the post-World War II period produced large, densely populated, congested metropolises. Some Asian governments addressed the problems of rapid expansion through massive construction projects that encompassed skyscraper office buildings, shopping malls, luxury apartments and hotels, and new airports. In Shanghai, in the span of little more than a decade, the Chinese government created Pudong New Area—a planned central business district along with factories and residences in Pudong, across the Huangpu River from Shanghai’s old downtown core. Many developing countries, however, are still preoccupied with political and economic problems and have made little progress toward establishing an environmental planning function capable of avoiding the insalubrious conditions that characterized Western cities in the 19th century.

The scope of planning

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the influence of planning broadened within Europe as various national and local statutes increasingly guided new development. European governments became directly involved with housing provision for the working class, and decisions concerning the siting of housing construction shaped urban growth. In the United States, local planning in the form of zoning began with the 1916 New York City zoning law, but it was not until the Great Depression of the 1930s that the federal government intervened in matters of housing and land use. During World War II, military mobilization and the need to coordinate defense production caused the development of the most extensive planning frameworks ever seen in the United States and Britain. Although the wartime agencies were demobilized after hostilities ended, they set a precedent for national economic and demographic planning, which, however, was much more extensive in Britain than in the United States.

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